Culturegasm: Iron Sky - crowdfunding the sequel, Director's Cut with 20 mins of more stuff out

Some of you might know about Iron Sky, our dark scifi comedy about Nazis from the dark side of the Moon. We are doing a video diary of sorts about how the project is progressing called Iron Sky Signal. We just got the latest episode up yesterday, this one is about our trip to Berlin to visit our art department. You can find the older episodes from our Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/energiaproductions

(A small disclaimer: in addition to being a Whitechapeler I am the publicist and making of producer of this movie. So if me linking our video diaries or stuff here feels too much like commercial promotion, feel free to smack this thread down and out like a red haired stepchild.)

I remember watching the trailer for this way back when, maybe two years ago. Does that sound about right? I was interested at the time, but kind of forgot about it having not heard anything. It's good to know it's moving along though, and I look forward to it. Those are some amazing costumes right there, too.

@Vornaskotti - the work on this film so far is very impressive. I saw pieces of StarWreck, and it was well done but since it was a parody of Star Trek, among other things, the design work was all derivative. Well done derivative, but ultimately not my thing.

The work you are previewing here on Iron Sky is orders of magnitude beyond that.

One thing I'm curious about - I had the impression that StarWreck was essentially a fan-film that got out of control. This seems more deliberately produced, yet you are still open to contributions and soliciting some level of participation from the online community. Your site states "produced by Energia Productions, Blind Spot Pictures and co-produced by 27 Films" - but I'm really curious what that means exactly.

This is just curiosity, so if you can't get into details I totally understand, but how are you guys producing this? Did you raise money from investors? Government or creative grants? Personal contributions?

The process of figuring out how to produce a feature film outside of the traditional system, and especially ways of doing that which leverage online communities, is something I'm always trying to find more examples of. I was following the progress of a film called Man Conquers Space for a while, but that one got to a certain point and then abandoned it's online community based funding and fell into some kind of version of a more traditional "Development Hell" black hole. (Checking back in on him right now, it looks like that filmmaker is in the process of regaining control of his project and possibly returning to a more modest production budget.)

Can you talk at all about the balance you guys are striking? Is everyone on some kind of payroll, or deferring salaries to potential profit share, or just straight up volunteering, or a mix? Do you know how money was raised? Is this a project being driven by a central auteur, or is it more of a group ambition?

I'm happy to talk more about the movie and our communal approach to filmmaking - there's stuff we can't reveal yet, but much what we can. But in any case, essentially Iron Sky is a "proper" movie project: the budget is over 5.5 million euros and it has been raised from investors, different kinds of national and local film foundations and so on. We are also doing crowd funding, one example was selling War Bonds and currently we are selling all kinds of merchandize, and a 100 euro support kit that contains them all. We are also ramping up the crowd funding far more, but that's something I can't go into details just yet.

Blind Spot Pictures is a traditional movie production house that has a bunch of movies under their belt, for example The Jade Warrior, and 27 Films are co-producers in Germany where we will be shooting and creating parts of the film. Then there's the production company Energia, which was founded by the guys who made Star Wreck, which is more unorthodox and nowadays concentrated on CGI effects. Basically we have stitched together a traditional movie business and a very untraditional community based approach. In a film like Iron Sky, where you have to handle hundreds of variables across several countries, and relatively huge amounts of money, you really do need the full movie making machinery to make things work. That's where the production companies come in: they have the knowhow to figure out how to do the logistics of bigger scale movie production, which has a lot of pitfalls.

Basically everybody who's actually working for the project is doing it on salary and employed or subcontracted by the production companies. BUT, then there's the community.

One of the strengths of Star Wreck was the fan support and how the fans helped to create the movie. The movie gathered a ton of fans all around the world and the creative crazy genius of people around the net was something that clearly should not be wasted. So, the guys built a platform for collaborative movie making called Wreckamovie.com. You should definitely take a look at that. Basically a movie maker (or a game designer, writer or whoever) can create a project there and give the fans tasks they can complete. The tasks can be really simple, like "come up with a cool name for this character", or really complicated, like "model us a spaceship". What you get is a direct line of communication between the movie makers and the fans/net community - and boy, people come up with the coolest shit in there if you just happen to ask. Here's Iron Sky and here's another crazy project that is currently on post production: Snowblind, the world's first post-apocalyptic arctic spaghetti western, with a budget of half a million euros.

But as I said, we have a terrific community that's getting bigger and more active all the time. Most of the core group are old geeks who have a good understanding on how the net works socially and practically, we really recognize that without the fan community neither Star Wreck nor Iron Sky would have ever been made. Some of the core places in the net are our blog, Facebook, Twitter and of course Wreckamovie.

About the balance... Well, as I said, everybody is on salary and right now the bigger weight is on the traditional side of funding, but crowdfunding is important also. Can't go to specifics further than that, sorry :)

Have you been getting much press coverage in Europe yet? Is there an awareness of your project in the less science-fiction oriented, less online world? This project strikes me as having a wide crossover appeal, as the high concept of Moon Nazis is absurd enough, and the concept pulled off visually beautifully enough, to have a fairly wide appeal, I suspect. In the US, I could easily see this becoming one of those "cult" films that people who don't watch cult films actually see. But it's also one of those films that will just get no wide-audience press coverage until it is actually distributed through some official channel, at which time there will be a bunch of articles about it treating it like it came out of the blue, despite the fact that you'll have a couple of years of transparently related online production notes. Are you being covered any better than that in Europe?

As far as independent filmmakers making the most of online communities, or taking readily available consumer tools to make solid genre features, it seems to me that European genre enthusiasts have been far more ambitious and adventurous than their counterparts here in the US. Here, it seems most of the energy that goes into indy filmmaking goes to self-consciously quirky romance or crime stories, or weird documentaries, but in general steers pretty clear of genre efforts other than maybe horror. Small budget feature length science fiction seems to be largely cerebral and effects-light, such as movies like Primer or Pi (both of which are quite old - I actually couldn't think of more recent valid examples of a feature length). I guess all the ambitious kids coming up with all the new cool tools here are flinging their efforts at the established system, and not reaching out to their peers as much to collaborate. In Europe right now, that seems quite different.

Do you get the sense yourself that there is this churning of peer creativity in filmed science fiction in Europe at the moment? Is there any sense that this might be a kind of nascent movement?

No, I don't mind answering stuff like this at all :) Sorry for the slight lag in replying, I'm currently on holiday in Cyprus and spending most of my days 30m deep and encased in rusty iron :)

Getting mainstream publicity for the movie is challenging, of course. Then again, we are only now getting into the phase of the production when we start to have a steady stream of something concrete to show. The pre-production phase is such unsexy business, just mailing budgets, propositions, plans and sponspor ship deals back and forth. Now that we are starting to have more concept art and such actual stuff to show and we are getting to within a year of the movie release, it's easier to get publicity and we are getting more active on the mainstream front. In Finland we have been covered pretty well and our director Vuorensola and producer Torssonen have been interviewed for several mainstream publications abroad too both about Star Wreck, community based movie making and Iron Sky.

We hope that the movie will end up being as you described in the first paragraph. With the script we want to avoid the obvious choices and cheap laughs, and we feel that it will have both mainstream and geek appeal ("geek" in a very loving sense, we in the core group are definitely geeks ourselves).

About the indie scifi movement, I personally think there might be something in what you are saying. There are several effects heavy indie scifi projects developed around Europe, but now that I think about it, I can't think of that many from US. Off the top of my hat I'd say that the fact that there really aren't that many "proper" high profile European scifi movies out there is a factor - doing European scifi still feels like a new and a fresh thing. In the States, on the other hand, an aspiring scifi maker will bump his head to everything from Star Trek, B5 and Star Wars to a zillion movies out there. Well, maybe the tables are turning - US is taking in cerebral stuff from European art films, and Europeans are getting into flashy effects.

All right, let's do some recruiting: Iron Sky is looking for movie professionals, actors, extras, general crew, car drivers, sponsors and what have you in Germany, specifically in Frankfurt am Main area next autumn.